Customer Case Study

Just Hockey: First click & collect order in 5 minutes. Two days of admin time back every week.

Just Hockey replaced their standard Retail Express–Shopify connector with SAAS Integrator’s purpose-built multi-store integration. Their first click & collect order landed within five minutes of go-live — with no promotion, no announcement, no campaign.

Customer Just Hockey — Australia’s number one hockey specialist, 40 years in business
Footprint 23 retail locations across Australia, plus seasonal pro shops
Platforms Retail Express POS, Shopify Plus, SAAS Integrator middleware, SAAS Click and Collect
Project Replace standard Retail Express–Shopify connector with SAAS Integrator’s purpose-built multi-store integration
Results at a Glance First click & collect order in 5 minutes — no promotion, no announcement, no campaign

Five minutes.

That’s how long it took for Just Hockey to prove the demand had been there all along.

Alex Mason flicked the switch on SAAS Integrator Click & Collect from the head office in Hallam, Melbourne. The module went live across all 23 Just Hockey store locations. Five minutes later, a customer in Perth — 3,400 kilometres away — found the option, picked their nearest store, and reserved their gear.

No email campaign. No social post. No banner across the homepage. Just a green tick that said in stock, and a customer ready to act on it.

“Even within the first 5 minutes that we switched on click & collect, there was a Perth order straight away. It shows you the modern customer — it’s just another good arrow to put in your bow.”
— Alex Mason, Just Hockey

That single moment exposed something Just Hockey had suspected for years. The demand was real. The infrastructure had been holding it back.

If you’re a multi-store retailer, this story will sound familiar

Your customers research online and buy in-store. Or research in-store and buy online. Or check stock from their phone in the carpark.

They don’t think about which channel they’re using. They want to know one thing: is the gear there, and how fast can I get it?

Your job is to make that simple. The technology underneath is supposed to disappear.

For most multi-store Retail Express retailers running Shopify, it doesn’t disappear. It groans. It demands manual workarounds. It costs the team hours every week and customers a clean experience.

This is the story of how one Australian retailer fixed it.

Forty years of hockey. One conviction.

Just Hockey opened its first store in Melbourne 40 years ago. One shop. One sport. One belief — that hockey players deserve specialists who understand the game.

Today that single store has grown into 23 locations: full-service retail in every major Australian city, supported by 8 to 9 seasonal pro shops embedded in regional hockey communities. Just Hockey now holds the title of Australia’s number one hockey specialist.

“We are the number one hockey specialist in Australia. Our competitors don’t have the footprint that we have.”
— Alex Mason, Just Hockey

Field hockey is tactile. Players want to feel the weight of a stick, balance it in their hands, talk to staff who can spot a beginner from an elite club player. That reality keeps roughly 60 to 70 percent of revenue inside the stores — and makes the digital experience harder to design, not easier.

Online had to do a specific job. Bridge to the store. Don’t replace it. Let customers research, check stock, see store hours, then either reserve for pickup or jump in the car knowing the gear they wanted was waiting.

That’s the bridge the legacy connector couldn’t build.

Where the standard setup was hitting its ceiling

For close to a decade, Just Hockey ran the standard out-of-the-box Retail Express to Shopify connector. It worked. For a single-location retailer, it would still work today.

But Just Hockey isn’t a single-location retailer.

At 23 stores, the gap between what a standard integration delivers and what a multi-store specialist actually needs widens fast. The team learned to live with the gap. They built workarounds. They paid for extra apps. They reconciled spreadsheets at the start of every season.

“It wasn’t as clear to the customer. The systems didn’t really talk to each other. Pricing didn’t come across well, and the setup was clunky.”
— Alex Mason, on the legacy connector

Two capability gaps sat at the centre.

Sponsorship pricing meant a week of spreadsheet work every season

The Australian Hockey Sponsorship program — AHS — anchors Just Hockey’s competitive position. Sponsored players sit at gold, silver, bronze, diamond, or platinum tiers. Each tier carries fixed pricing on key products. Not percentage discounts. Fixed prices, awarded to elite players who anchor the brand.

Retail Express handled it perfectly in-store. Online was a different story.

The team maintained a parallel B2B app on Shopify. Every season, they manually reconciled a complex spreadsheet against Retail Express. That spreadsheet became the bottleneck of January — the busiest month of the hockey season.

“We were having to duplicate everything. For online, we had to use an app and double handle a complicated spreadsheet. At the start of the year when you’re already flat out, it would normally take a whole week of focused work.”
— Alex Mason, Just Hockey

The B2B app also fought the search filter app. Two third-party tools competing for the same product data. Customers caught in the middle. Filter behaviour breaking on the storefront for reasons nobody could trace cleanly.

Click & collect was static. Disconnected. Disappointing.

The legacy click & collect was a basic stock checker. Customers couldn’t pick a store on the homepage and have it follow them through the journey. Postcode entered on one page didn’t carry to the next. The flow felt patched together because it was.

Worse — click & collect didn’t tell stores anything about the sales they were fulfilling. Every online order, including click & collect orders that store staff physically pulled and handed over, reported against head office.

The store managers doing the work weren’t seeing it in their numbers. The internal politics wrote themselves.

And the broader cost

Across the team, two people were spending roughly two days a week on manual workarounds, double handling, spreadsheet reconciliation, and product status fixes.

“At least a couple of days a week for those kinds of projects and tasks — across the two core people doing the work.”
— Alex Mason, Just Hockey

Two days. Every week. On work that produced no customer value and no business growth — just stability for a system that should have been delivering both.

Alex described the previous setup as clunky to configure and largely set-and-forget once installed. The implementation came with a package and ended there.

Why Just Hockey chose to replace, not patch

Patching the existing connector would have been the easier short-term call. New B2B app. New shipping rules. Extra middleware to handle the location problem. Each fix layered on top of the last.

Just Hockey saw it differently.

After 40 years building the brand, the leadership saw the customer journey as one continuous experience — online research, store visit, expert advice, fulfilment — not two channels stitched together with apps.

“It was about connecting the in-store and online process. Click & collect was necessary, but it was just more about connecting the online and in-store a lot more.”
— Alex Mason, Just Hockey

The conversation with SAAS Integrator started through an existing relationship with Troy Netreba, who had spent over a decade working with Retail Express retailers. The pre-sales experience itself was the differentiator.

“The support helping us set up step by step has been a lot better and clearer.”
— Alex Mason, Just Hockey

Building the bridge

The scope was deliberately structural — rebuild the foundation, not redecorate the surface.

The work was delivered in close partnership with The Hope Factory, Just Hockey’s Shopify development partner. Bringing all parties to the table early — the customer, their dev team, and the integration specialist — is how complex multi-store projects get delivered on time. Solutions land faster when nobody is working in isolation.

Native location architecture across all 23 stores

Every Retail Express outlet was mapped one-to-one to a native Shopify location. For the first time, Shopify understood that Just Hockey was a 23-store retailer, not a single warehouse.

That single change unlocked everything that followed.

SAAS Integrator Click & Collect with postcode continuity, store hours, and store credit

SAAS Integrator Click & Collect replaced the legacy stock checker. Postcode entered on the homepage now carries through to product pages, then to cart, then to checkout. Store hours surface where customers need them — especially valuable for the seasonal pro shops with non-standard opening times.

Click & collect orders now report against the fulfilling store, not head office. Store managers see their effort reflected in their daily numbers.

AHS pricing through native Shopify Plus B2B

The third-party B2B app was retired. Retail Express price groups now flow directly into Shopify Plus’s native B2B catalogues.

A sponsored player tagged at gold or platinum in Retail Express logs into the website and sees their fixed pricing automatically. No app. No spreadsheet. No filter conflicts.

“It’s now showing online nice and clearly. There’s no double handling of having to use an app on Shopify and do the pricing in Retail Express. Now it all flows through one, which is much more convenient.”
— Alex Mason, Just Hockey

Reliable product status and bidirectional fulfilment

Products created in Retail Express now arrive in Shopify in the team’s preferred state. Configurable products no longer break in transit. Fulfilment status flows both ways, removing the double-update workflow the team had been running for years.

“It’s a lot clearer now and works without glitches. The previous setup used to cause issues when products were created — configurable products would be all over the place.”
— Alex Mason, Just Hockey

What changed — in Alex’s words

After go-live, the picture clarified quickly. Some changes were measurable. Others showed up in how the team described their work.

The five-minute Perth order — and what came after

The headline already covered the five minutes. The deeper signal mattered more.

Just Hockey only ran a soft launch on click & collect. Major promotion is still planned for the months ahead. And Perth has continued to be one of the most popular regions for click & collect orders, all from organic discovery on the product page.

“We’ve done a soft launch and it’s getting used quite a bit; particularly Perth seems quite popular for click & collect.”
— Alex Mason, Just Hockey

Two days a week of admin time recovered

The week-long AHS spreadsheet ritual is gone. The B2B app and its filter conflicts are gone. The product status workarounds are gone.

“It’s definitely saving a good percentage of time using the new integration.”
— Alex Mason, Just Hockey

That’s meaningful capacity returned to a small team — and it’s now redirected toward the next phase of growth. Extending B2B pricing to schools, clubs, and associations. What used to be a build project is now a configuration project.

Reporting clarity that finance and stores can both trust

“The reporting has been a lot better from the finance side. For monthly reports for the different states, it’s a lot clearer to determine who’s posting what and who’s doing what in each store.”
— Alex Mason, Just Hockey

The internal politics around online sale ownership have dissipated. Stores see their numbers. Finance sees clean state-level breakdowns. Head office no longer needs to amalgamate three reports to understand what’s happening across the network.

AHS pricing flows automatically, all season

A sponsored player in the AHS program now logs into the Just Hockey website and sees their tier pricing immediately — no manual upload, no app conflict, no January crunch.

“The AHS program being usable online is a lot better and clearer now.”
— Alex Mason, Just Hockey

A click & collect experience that customers actually use

“It’s a lot cleaner. The in-stock, out-of-stock interface with a little green tick is just a lot nicer. Some customers check stock and hop in the car. Others do the full click & collect process. The store hours being right there is good too.”
— Alex Mason, Just Hockey

Both customer paths matter. Some shoppers want to reserve and collect later. Others want confirmation that the gear is there before driving over. The new module supports both — without forcing customers down a single funnel.

Key metrics at a glance

5 minutes First click & collect order after go-live
~2 days/week Admin time recovered
1 week → automatic AHS pricing setup time
23 locations Retail footprint integrated

The honest part — what didn’t go perfectly

Real projects have real friction.

Just Hockey’s go-live had three notable post-launch issues. Payment method mapping for Afterpay and Zip orders. A Boost Commerce search index that needed re-syncing after the new location data went live. A batch of price mismatches that needed correction across the catalogue.

Each was identified, scoped, and resolved within the support cycle. Alex’s response when asked how it felt was direct.

“Resolved and pretty quickly. It was good to just get those fixed up.”
— Alex Mason, Just Hockey

What’s next for Just Hockey

With the foundation in place, the roadmap has shifted from rebuilding to extending.

Customer loyalty integration: Connecting Retail Express points balances directly to Shopify via Yotpo, so customers earn and redeem the same way online and in-store. Alex described loyalty as “the next exciting part of connecting.” The team is finalising the points structure internally before kicking off configuration.

B2B expansion to schools, clubs, and associations: With AHS proven, extending fixed pricing to bulk-buying institutions becomes a configuration project – not a build project.

Shipping rate optimisation: With Shopify now aware of fulfilment locations across the network, Just Hockey has the platform to let AusPost calculate true rates per origin location. Alex has flagged this as the next active project, particularly given recent AusPost rate changes.

Pre-order strategy: Shifting select out-of-stock items to pre-order with custom messaging. Protects SEO ranking, captures sales otherwise lost, drives in-store conversation.

Who should consider SAAS Integrator

We asked Alex directly. The answer wasn’t a list of technical specifications. It was a description of a mindset.

“It’s stores that want to connect their online and in-store process. Customers these days vary so much — some want to shop online, some want to shop in-store. The click & collect and the different price groups help us serve both ends of the equation.”
— Alex Mason, Just Hockey

And on looking more professional to customers:

“Modern retail runs on click & collect. Offering it tells customers we can deliver more — not less — than the bigger players.”
— Alex Mason, Just Hockey

If that mindset sounds familiar — if your business sits at the intersection of physical retail and digital commerce, and the connector you’re using right now feels like a compromise rather than a bridge — we’d like to hear from you.

Ready to build your own bridge?

Just Hockey didn’t transform their operation through a feature list. They transformed it by replacing the layer between Retail Express and Shopify with something built specifically for multi-store Australian retailers.

If the seams between Retail Express and Shopify are showing in your business, let’s talk. Troy Netreba has spent over a decade helping Australian retailers like Just Hockey close the gap. Thirty minutes. No pitch deck. Just a conversation about what’s possible.

Book a discovery call

About Just Hockey

Just Hockey is Australia’s leading specialist field hockey retailer, founded in Melbourne 40 years ago. The company operates 23 locations nationwide, supplying everything from elite-level sticks and goalkeeping equipment to community club kits. Just Hockey runs the Australian Hockey Sponsorship program (AHS), a tier-based partnership with elite players across the country.

www.justhockey.com.au

About SAAS Integrator

SAAS Integrator transforms how businesses operate by connecting their entire tech ecosystem seamlessly.

While others see us as just another integration platform, we look at every connection through a revenue lens. How can this help generate more leads? Drive more sales? Deliver exceptional customer experiences?

That mindset is why multi-store Australian retailers running Retail Express and Shopify trust us to unify their in-store and online operations — across click & collect, B2B pricing, location-based inventory, store-level reporting, and the next initiative on their roadmap.

www.saasintegrator.com